


Prologue; Cast Enters, Stage Right.

by duckgirlie



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 09:57:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2808296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckgirlie/pseuds/duckgirlie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone has their first year story, and at the end of the day, they're all the same. New Burbage was always more seductive then it should be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prologue; Cast Enters, Stage Right.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nehirose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nehirose/gifts).



Frank missed the first year, but that barely counts. The first year was built on nothing but a whim and a prayer and the lessened overheads provided by all your productions being in the public domain. 

The second year, the year when everyone started to think that maybe the New Burbage Theatre Festival could actually make something of itself, Frank was there.

-

He plays a minor Montague that year, and a member of the chorus. Whoever is directing _Romeo & Juliet _is an idiot and _Medea_ is probably going to be a lot of interesting performances wrapped up in a disappointing production, but he has a regular paycheck for the whole summer and the festival bar is frequently full of the kind of men his father warned him people would mistake him for if he became an actor, and so he cannot quite bring himself to care.__

____

-

He didn't mean to stay that long. But steady paychecks the promise of more lines next year have a way of settling a man down, and he becomes a fixture before he even notices. The fourth year - the year when his seat in the bar becomes His Seat in the bar - Cyril shows up, and Frank is entranced within minutes.

-

Cyril thinks that one year will be enough for him, because he's never felt the need to be in once place for long. Which is true, he doesn't feel the need to be in New Burbage forever (the paycheck is nice, the paycheck is always nice, but there will be other paychecks) but it's not very long before he feels the need to be with Frank for longer then he can imagine, and that settles the matter before it's even brought up.

\- - - - -

Anna joined New Burbage right out of college.

She'd majored in Business because her dad had talked at great length about how it was the most useful subject she could study (the 'with my money' going unsaid but definitely heard), and joined the drama club but never set foot on stage.

There was a suspicious ease to the interview, and she'd been surprised when she got the call afterwards. It's not until she's being lead around a crowded office by her direct supervisor, a woman who seems comprised mostly of scarves and wads of tissue paper that she starts to understands exactly how little she is to be trusted with, and thinks that for all she knows, they drew lots to see which of the many twenty-two-year-olds that interviewed would get the job.

The training takes a single long afternoon, starting with how the artistic director takes his coffee (three sugar, cream on the side because 'you'll never get it right so don't try') and ending with the number to call if the fax machine stops working. In between, she nearly spills coffee all over Maggie Smith and her heavily annotated copy of The Memorandum, and had her shoelace 'borrowed' by props. (She knows theatre people, she's never getting that shoelace back.)

The next day, her supervisor is nowhere around and there are fourteen million people who all need something immediately. She thinks she can help most of them, but she's been given strict instructions not to, so she carefully logs every question or request in a large book, then later transfers it all to a computer database. In between, she faxes press releases to every tangentially-relevant Canadian publication, and more then a few American ones.

The second day, the fax machine breaks.

There is no one more indispensable then the person who can fix the fax machine when there is no one answering the manufacturer's phone line.

\- - - - -

Oliver has two - no, three - first seasons at New Burbage.

The first as an actor, an underwhelming year he would very much like to have stricken from the record, but we all have our mediocrities to bear. The second as a director, his most prestigious credit yet, and his direction of _Dream_ gets quite a few accolades.

The third is when it finally becomes _his_ festival, and it's a moment he's been waiting for for years. He's had the perfect season picked out ever since he'd directed his first professional play, and he is ready to make a splash.

Not everything survives, of course. There were pencil-pushers too concerned with profit over art even then, but he gets enough in to feel like he's made his mark.

There's always next year.

\- - - - -

The first time he's at New Burbage, Geoffrey is Claudio, and gets in fights with the director.

He meets Oliver by accident, storming out after a difficult rehearsal, and he's less then a quarter of the way through a coffee before he's worked up again.

"...the idea that just because something was common at the time means that we don't have to think about what it means now is completely absurd, and is the exact reason why so many people come to the theatre to see Shakespeare and leave feeling like they've been to a bad museum."

"Exactly. Where's the vitality?"

"Exactly."

Geoffrey slumps into his chair and sighs. He's lucky to be here and he loves the play, but there is something that burns him about engaging with the material so uncritically. Even Darren - _Darren_ \- understood you had to think about what a play was really about before you could do it justice. 

Oliver sighed and patted him on the back.

"Tomorrow, go in there and play him the way you think you should, don't listen. At best, you infuse the rest of them with a new sense of the text and drag them with you, at worst the reviews will say 'Geoffrey Tennent seems to be acting in an entirely different production' and as long as that production is a good one, no one will care that it's not the same production as the rest of them."

He only manages to drag half the cast with him, and the result is a production that Basil terms 'almost dangerously out-of-sync', but the one thing all the reviewers can agree on is that he's going places.

Geoffrey doesn't care. He doesn't need to be going places, he's exactly where he wants to be.

\- - - - -

Darren's first year is unremarkable, his second is a complete shit-show that sees him vowing to never return.

He's back two years later, armed with fire.


End file.
